DRMA Spotlight: Atomic Direct — 'Building Brand' the Right Way

In his new book, Building Brand with Direct Response Television,Atomic Direct’s Doug Garnett showcases more than two decades of wisdom about the outsized capabilities of great DRTV.

In his new book, Atomic Direct’s Doug Garnett showcases more than two decades of wisdom about the outsized capabilities of great DRTV.

PORTLAND, Ore. — “Fundamentally, the biggest thing is for marketers to understand that they can build brand with this medium,” says Doug Garnett, founder and CEO of Portland, Ore.-based creative house Atomic Direct, talking about his new book “Building Brand With Direct Response Television.”

He continues, “A lot of brand agencies go off this mythology that if we paint pretty pictures of a brand, people will love it. You know what? People build a brand once they get the product in their hands. You need a product in hand to represent the brand, and putting that product there is what we do particularly well.”

Atomic Direct — a member of the Direct Response Marketing Alliance (DRMA) — has been doing that since 1998, when Garnett left then-DRTV mega-agency Tyee to set out on his own. “I’d been VP of strategy for about five years and worked with a tremendous set of corporate campaigns,” he says. “I was frustrated we weren’t getting the total value for our clients. I was trying to find a new way between what Tyee was doing, which was beautiful but often didn’t move the needle, and the ‘yell-and-sell’ stuff that was effective at moving the needle directly but not at building brands.”

Portland, Ore.-based Atomic Direct is featured in the November issue of Response Magazine as part of the brand-new DRMA Spotlight feature. View a video interview here.